Quotes from Peter Drucker

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.

That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society "post-capitalist.

Business is society's change agent.

If you're not living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we're right.

Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.

An effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.

A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, "What business am I in?" Second, "How's business?"

The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.